tempus fugit

Driving to Jacksonville Third Draft

At first I thought my father was a fountainhead of wisdom, but later I came to accept that he was behind the times. Lucky for me that men’s fashions run in cycles almost like women’s fashions. Wait a while, and your clothes will be stylish again. I have several outfits of my father’s that fit me well and look good. Only the shoes are too small.

One

I was eight years old in 1962 when my father (Theodore) drove me (Conrad) to Jacksonville, Illinois from Denver, Colorado. We were living in Denver then. It was me, my sister (Cathy), and my mother (Greta); my parents were separated. My sister and I didn’t know that our parents were actually divorced.

My father came back from a trip, with presents for me and my sister. My father was dating a woman named Vicki, who would soon become my stepmother.

By this time, he had me living with him part of the time at his bachelor apartment with a closed-in porch that I slept in. One day, he threw out some old magazines, Playboys, and left a pile of them on the stoop. I came in, saw the magazines, and sat down to start reading them.

He noticed that I was reading them, but he didn’t say anything, just let me keep on reading. I didn’t understand at that time what it was all about, or why there were so many pictures of naked women (with their pubic areas discreetly obscured.) I wasn’t interested, but just kept the magazine in mind for later use.

This was part of my desensitization to pornography and other shocking things. My father didn’t know it at the time, but he was making the pornography uninteresting to me by not reacting to my reading it. Maybe he did realize that not reacting was the best way to deal with it.

I found out right away when I started staying with him that he had some amazing books. There were books on all kinds of forbidden subjects, especially sex, and many science fiction paperbacks. I already enjoyed reading, and this variety of subjects was even more interesting.

Another day, he stacked some milk cartons (at that time, they were made of waxed cardboard), crushing them and putting several crushed cartons inside another one. Then he set them on the sidewalk and lit them. They burned, slowly, for an hour, as the wax melted and contributed to the fire..

I watched a few television programs while I was staying with my father. He let me watch “Rocky and Bullwinkle” but most cartoons were not acceptable to him. One night, the movie version of “Moby Dick” was shown on television, and my father helped me to stay awake so I could watch it and remember the plot.

He had an old Nash automobile; it ran and got us where we wanted to go. The Nash was last produced in 1957; I don’t know what year myfather’s car was, but it had to have been at least five years old or more in 1962. Here is a picture of a 1946 Nash four-door sedan from Wikipedia:

Nash_4-Door_Sedan_2
The three of us, mother, me, and my sister, were living in the student apartments, a group of three-story dormitory-like buildings of brick with basement common rooms. Our apartment had two bedrooms and my sister and I slept in one, on a bunk bed. My mother slept in the other bedroom.

The kitchen had a window that looked out over the yard between the buildings. During that time, I had many friends among the children who lived there while their parents were studying at the university. We played hide and seek, even at night, and met in the common rooms.

Two

One day I was playing with matches in the window well of a basement common room. There were bushes around the window well so it was hard to see in. I wanted to strike a match and see what it looked like. The ground in the window well was wet and slippery, and I pitched over backwards onto the glass. I hit the glass with the back of my head, broke the glass, and cut myself in the occipital area of my head.

I stumbled out of the window well, ignoring the broken window behind me. My first concern was that my brains would fall out. Crying and screaming, I ran to the nearest first floor apartment and banged on the door. Blood was pouring out of the back of my head onto my shirt. The lady who answered must have been shocked, by her expression, and she helped me to my parents.

They took me to a hospital, and the doctor put thirteen stitches on the back of my head. My father took me home in his friend’s sports car after that; I think it was a Triumph TR-3. I stayed with my father more at his apartment. Here is a picture of a Triumph TR-3A, the most popular TR-3 model:

220px-Triumph_TR3A

Three

Later, we spent the summer in a resort town called Crystal Lake, up in the mountains above Denver. It had a lake that was eight hundred feet deep, with freezing water. I fished there for the first time that I can remember, and caught some little rainbow trout that they made me throw back. I had a little sailboat that I puttered around the marina with. We would go swimming, but that involved a ten- to fifteen-second dip with an immediate bound out of the water, which must have been about forty degrees Fahrenheit.

My father came to visit, driving his friend’s Triumph. I loved riding in that car; you could reach out from the passenger seat and touch the road while the car was in motion. There was a deep tunnel under the dashboard where I put my feet and legs, and I could scrunch down inside there and not be seen from outside with the top up.

At first, my mother and I stayed with some well-to-do friends that had a boy my age; I just remember that he was terribly spoiled and his mother cut the crusts off the bread she served him in his sandwiches.

One day, the other boy and I got to looking at a collection of pennies that he had. There were about five hundred pennies in a little tackle box. We looked at an ad in a magazine that said pennies more than so many years old were worth “up to” so much money. We interpreted it to mean “every” such penny was worth so much and proceeded to comb through his collection. We found a lot of old pennies but they turned out to be worthless.

My mother, my sister, and I moved to a small summer cabin in the town of Crystal Lake. It was primitive, with a real “ice box” and a propane stove and a fireplace. It only had two rooms and an outhouse.

My parents were separated; I didn’t know what was going on, and they didn’t explain it to me. I knew that they had been arguing a lot, but that seemed to have stopped after they were separated.

That fall we drove to Jacksonville.

Four

We had been living in Hawaii; I was four when we moved there, and six when we went back to California. We flew to San Francisco, and my mother, my sister, and I moved in with my mother’s mother. I didn’t know where my father was at that time. My mother argued a lot with her mother.

We moved to Davis, where my mother enrolled in the University of California, Davis for graduate school, I think. It’s possible that we just stayed in an apartment in Davis. I learned how to ride a bicycle in Davis, but other than that nothing happened. I still didn’t know where my father was; I only saw him once in a while

One day, I was riding my bicycle when I accidentally steered through a group of older boys playing basketball on an outdoor court. I was paralyzed; I couldn’t stop, slow down, or turn, and I just went right through the group of kids on the basketball court without hitting any of them, although they were angry with me at the time.

It was very quiet in Davis. I learned to eat malted milk tablets, which I don’t think are made any more. My sister and I lived there for a few months with my mother; I don’t remember going to school there.

We moved to Denver, and that was where I started seeing a lot more of my father and really going to school. Apparently he had been working and going to school at the University of Denver the entire time.

I started in first grade, but halfway through the year, the teachers switched me to second grade. I didn’t remember, but I had a number of psychometric tests, as well as intelligence tests and so on. My father included me as a subject in a research project that he was doing. The project mainly involved just describing individual gifted children. At that time there was really no clue as to what was going on in a gifted child’s brain.

When I moved up to third grade, I began to find the schoolwork boring. I wanted to find some short-cut so I could move up, but none ever came. I continued to be one year ahead of the other kids.
My mother, my sister, and I first lived in a nice brick house which had a basement. I was able to walk to school from there. It was also close to the Denver University campus.

My mother stitched a large number of stuffed animals while we were living in that house; my sister arranged them all on her bed so that there was just room for her to lie down surrounded by stuffed animals.

Five

One day my father told me that we were going to move to a new place, that it would be good for me. I had already had a number of tests of intelligence and creativity, part of his thesis for his doctorate in psychology. He was studying at the University of Denver to get his PhD in psychology, and his thesis was a research study of gifted children. He told me that because he was getting a doctorate, he would be able to take this really good job in Jacksonville.

It was only when we were in his car, the Nash, that I started asking questions about my sister and my mother. He told me that he and my mother had gotten a divorce, and that Cathy was going with her and I was going with him. I told him I didn’t like the fact that he had gotten a divorce. He said to me, “She was the one who asked for a divorce. It wasn’t my idea.”

I sat in the corner of the big front seat and the heavy door of the car. I squeezed myself in as far as I could and started crying. I didn’t make much noise.The road to Jacksonville was dark; there was no moon, and the headlights and tail-lights of passing cars, white in front of us and red behind us. Not driving, being a passenger, just looking out the side window, I could see nothing in the darkness.

We ran out of gas a mile before reaching a town. Alone, huddled in the big front seat under a coat, I waited patiently…

I only found out years later that my father had told my mother that he had gone to a judge and had gotten custody of me and left my sister in my mother’s custody. He said the judge had ordered him to pay child support to my mother for my sister. That was part of his motivation for taking me with him when he moved to Jacksonville.

The part about going to a judge was all a lie; he had never gone to a judge, but he felt that telling her that would make it easier for her to comply with what he thought was right.

He also felt that my mother wouldn’t raise me right and that I would be intellectually stunted if he left me with her.

I said I wanted to see my mother and my sister again and my father said that they would come and visit us. I didn’t like it but there was nothing I could do.

Later when I was really upset, after we had been in Jacksonville for a few months, I started thinking about how I could get back to Denver. I knew it was eight hundred miles, but I thought, “If I start walking now, maybe someone will pick me up and take me along.” I thought of all the cold and snow on the way, but I was so upset I just wanted to get up and start walking back to Denver.

I got sick and had a fever, and I wanted to see my mother, but she couldn’t come. I felt really small, like a bug on the bedspread, and everything was as big as mountains. I walked and walked along the spread, and I was still in the same place. Then everything reversed and I felt vertiginous as the scale seemed to slide back in place.The dawn light was already full on us when he came trudging slowly back. After cranking the starter for a while, the engine fired again, and we set off into town to the gas station for a fill. I slept for a while.

There was a group of stars in the sky that I recognized. It was called Orion, the hunter. There are three stars together that make up its belt; these everyone can see. These stars turned about in the southeastern sky.

Alone, I would face a group of peers, my age and older, that I knew nothing about; and I would have to prove myself, in the fourth-grade sense of the word, to these strangers. I didn’t know what I would do; it scared me to have to meet so many people by myself

I wasn’t exposed to any sports training as a child, at least not at first. My mother tried to teach me baseball with a bat made from a tree branch. Later on, she sent me to a judo class and this turned out best for me.

My father didn’t participate in sports. He never played catch with me, nor any other game. He still thought it was important that I should play sports, particularly basketball when I started growing extremely tall. I didn’t go to basketball until eighth grade. So I was behind the other kids in athletic development, despite my great height.

It was only much later that I learned the truth from a man I met on the Internet. He informed me that he had seen me play when I was in high school, and that I had a natural talent for basketball. He said that I could have become at least a strong college player. He told me that I had “what it takes”: height, coordination, and drive. The only thing that held me up was a poor interaction with my high school basketball coach.It got cold in the early morning; my father fiddled with the heater controls but no warm air came through the vents. This was unusual because the Nash was known for its advanced cabin heating system. This car was old, and some of its features were degrading. I put on a sweater that my mother had sent with us; this made me feel warmer right away.
My mother told me that I didn’t have to memorize the multiplication tables, that I was too smart for that, and I should be studying other things. In fact, I finally did learn to memorize the multiplication tables and it took just a few minutes of study, well worth the time. Now, after memorizing the tables, I was able to do all those things, multiplication and division, in my head.

I also had terrible penmanship, and when I started doing math problems, the numbers would wander all over the page. Vicki worked with me to straighten up the numbers into columns so that the mathematics problems would be easier to understand; without the straight columns, it was difficult to do multiplication and division problems on paper (this was before calculators replaced doing these things with a pencil and paper.)We finally reached Jacksonville after driving straight for eight hundred miles, stopping only for gas. As a faculty member, my father was allotted housing, a first floor apartment in a three story building; the second floor was occupied by a language laboratory, where students listened to taped lessons in their chosen language.

Six

The first thing I noticed when I lay down in bed was that the sounds from the language laboratory could be heard through the ventilator shafts, which were commodious and made of sheet metal. Even at night, it seemed, I could hear people talking in French, Spanish, German, Russian, or unintelligibly in some unknown language.

When I went to school, I found that classes had already started, and I was a few days behind. Everyone stared at me. I was not surprised to see a few black faces in the class, although I had never seen a Negro before. My father had told me that there would be black people here and explained that they were exactly the same as everyone else except that their skin color was darker. As a result of his talking to me, I developed a positive attitude towards black people, seeing them as being unfairly beaten down by whites with status.

He told me to treat everyone the same. I didn’t understand at first what he meant, but later I realized that not everyone thinks the same way. I liked the black people I met, given my father’s admonition, and in the fashion of the day, they would cautiously agree to accept me.

6a.
I wanted to get a cat, but my father said no, you can’t have a cat. I began to think much later that he didn’t want me to have a cat because he was afraid it would make me gay.

My father said, we’ll get you a dog, so we went to a farm outside of town and we got a beagle puppy. We tried to keep him in the house, but he couldn’t be paper-trained. Nothing would induce him to poop in the right place.

One day the dog pooped on the floor right in front of the front door. My father came in from class and stepped right into it, almost slipping on it. That was the last of the dog. My father gave her to our neighbors across the alley, who kept it tied up in the back yard.

Our neighbors were what some people would call “poor white trash.” I played with the boy who was my age. There were other children both older and younger than I. We went to the same school. Franklin Elementary School. After grade school, I didn’t see the boy who was my age anymore.

6b.

Before we drove to Jacksonville, my father began dating a woman that he met at his school (he was going for a PhD.) They were both in the same class at Denver University. She was several years his junior; she was perhaps 21, and he was almost 35.

He was also dating anothe woman that he met at school, but I did not know her as well. My father expected me to make a decision as to which one he should marry. Whether he would take my advice or not, I do not know(although I suspect he would have used his influence to change my decision if it was not to his liking.)

After he got the job in Jacksonville, he proposed marriage to her (although he had already made sure of her by taking her to bed.) She was very taken with him and accepted.

Her most important function, to him, was that she was an expert typist. She had been clocked at over a hundred words a minute on an IBM Selectric. She typed his entire PhD thesis on that IBM Selectric, and she actually wrote most of it as well.

I learned to type on that same IBM Selectric, and I soon became a typing whiz. I loved the look of the rotating ball that held the letters that it typed. I learned to touch type, which saves time over the hunt-and-peck system. Later I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and I used Vicki’s portable even into college.

The IBM Selectric’s ball was fancy, but the daisy wheel typing system was more efficient: it was faster, simpler, and more reliable. The daisy wheel caught on a few years later and wiped the IBM Selectric from the market.

6c.
During the Christmas vacation, Vicki and my father got married while I stayed with my mother and sister. My mother was crying and I didn’t know what had gone wrong, but much later I realized that she was crying because she still loved him and didn’t want him to get married again.

She couldn’t live with him because of the arguments so she had asked for a divorce; but she couldn’t avoid him completely, depending on him for money, among other things. After the divorce, she only asked for child support for myself and my sister. Even so, it was hard on him.

6c.

We drove back to Jacksonville, the three of us, after Christmas. I had met Vicki, my new stepmother, before, and I had thought she was very nice; in fact, I preferred her over the other girl that my father had suggested to me for a new mother. I’m not sure, but I think he was pleased with my choice because he preferred Vicki too.

When we got back to Jacksonville, we opened the front door to find the rooms completely filled with steam and water all over the floor. The pipes in the bathroom had frozen and burst, and there was a natural ice sculpture in the bathroom with icicles hanging from the ceiling. Apparently the heat had been left off while we were gone and it got so cold that the water in the pipes froze. When it thawed, the pipes that had broken open started spurting water everywhere.

We stayed at a motel for a couple of days until the college maintenance staff had cleaned up our apartment.

6d.

Many years later, Vicki told me that Ted had laid down some rules for her to follow. She told me that he had said that she should never touch me, not even a hug or a kiss. I was to be kept in the dark as much as possible with regards to her and she was to stay fully dressed whenever she was around me. I never saw that she was particularly good-looking, but some of my friends when I was in junior high school told me that, to them, she looked really beautiful.

Nonetheless, Vicki and I developed a close friendship and we played word games and other little amusements. I don’t remember exactly what we did. It was like playing with codes or ciphers and Vicki read from books.

We did get a pet, or rather two pets, in the form of a hamster boy and a hamster girl who lived together in a cage with a running wheel. They lived together for several months, but there was no sign of anything but brotherly love between the two.

Sometimes the hamsters would get out of their cages. They usually headed for the couch and stayed under the couch to avoid being stepped on. They were easy to catch when they were spotted, as they didn’t fear us.

One day, I caught a gray mouse under the concrete stoop behind the kitchen, outside of the house. He was uninjured. I had previously caught a mouse this way, but accidentally killed him in the process. This mouse survived.

I brought the wild mouse into the house and showed it to my hamsters. I could have sworn that a tiny black object flew from the mouse to the hamsters. The next morning, all three were dead.

Vicki consoled me after this loss and found a sturdier pet: the gerbils that the psychology lab was using in its experiments, as a variation on using rats all the time. Vicki served as a substitute for both my mother and my sister, and she managed to fill the job well after some practice. We raised the gerbil in a glass cage because its strong jaws and teeth could gnaw through almost anything.

In the laboratory, the gerbils formed a colony in a huge container half full of sand. They built tunnels into the sand and designated some for food storage, others for escape. They came out at night, so we used night vision equipment to watch them on the surface.

The MacMurray College Psychology Laboratory was in a position to publish a number of ground-breaking papers on the behavior of gerbils. My father was on the staff of the psychology department, as was my stepmother.

Vicki had continued to take postgraduate courses and had passed an examination on her German fluency for reading scholarly papers written in German. She eventually got a PhD in psychology, and her specialty was statistics.
Seven

I couldn’t seem to fit in at school. The teachers liked me, but the other kids didn’t. Soon the kids were teasing me in the schoolyard. One of the worst kids was Stuart Freiburg.

I got into trouble one day when I passed a note to Stuart that had a naughty word in it, “shit” or something like that. The teacher sent me home with a note and I had to explain to my father.

He said that there are several words that people don’t want to have heard in public, and it was just a social convention. He said that I should not use those words with other people, but when I was grown up, it wouldn’t matter so much.

I didn’t like some of the things he told me, and I began to think of him as a tyrant when he refused to let me watch television at all, or limited my viewing

The place where he succeeded the most was in making me get good grades. He paid me, for example, ten cents for every “outstanding”; if I got a “satisfactory” I got nothing. If I got a “needs improvement” then I lost ten cents. We got report cards every six weeks and there were some thirty or forty marks on each card. There was a chance I could get as much as three dollars on a single report card.

After he instituted this system, my grades picked up rapidly. Within six months, I was making two dollars or more on every report card.

My best friend when I was in fourth through eighth grade was Lynn Ruby. He was also ostracized by some of the other students. I was teased just for being different, but I stood up for myself and fought back whenever I was attacked. A few times I was ganged up upon by several other kids, but that happened rarely.

Lynn and I did a lot together. One of the last times I visited his house, he had a set of drums that he was playing on and we talked about starting a band. I even wrote a few lyrics, like “She’s as cold as a Frigid-Aire.” Later on, he started a band and played at night, being so tired during the day that he fell asleep in class. He told me later that he had been suspected of using drugs but he was really just tired from late-night jam sessions.

Lynn and I had a nemesis: Stuart Freiburg. He had some strange ideas. One day he chased both of us home from school. I escaped but he caught up with Lynn. Lynn told me that Stuart didn’t want to beat us up, he just wanted to be friends with us.

I did talk to Stuart, and even exchanged notes with him in class.

Stuart was very confused. His father was a member of the college faculty, a physics professor. My father and his father didn’t get along, and would have arguments in faculty meetings. My father offered me money to punch Stuart in the face.

Every time Stuart started fighting with me, I would try to punch him in the face. I broke his glasses, and my father gave me a dollar. He said he would give me five dollars if I broke his nose. That was a fortune for me at the time, but I couldn’t hit him that hard.

Later on, Stuart did become involved with “drugs”– he used LSD a number of times and was hospitalized for two weeks because of it. He became a shoplifter and did a number of other things; I can imagine what he might have done but didn’t have any contact with him after I graduated from high school.